{"id":178242,"date":"2019-01-30T19:28:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T00:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/30\/why-scott-walker-lost-his-bit-for-reelection\/"},"modified":"2019-01-30T19:28:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T00:28:00","slug":"why-scott-walker-lost-his-bit-for-reelection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/30\/why-scott-walker-lost-his-bit-for-reelection\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Scott Walker Lost His Bit for Reelection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because he offered over $4 billion in subsidies to the electronics manufacturer Foxconn to build a factory<\/a>, an amount that could never be recouped.<\/p>\n

It gets even better, because now Foxconn has announced that it won’t be building the factory after all.<\/p>\n

It appears that there wasn’t a, “No backsies,” provision in the contract:<\/p>\n

It was heralded a year and a half ago as the start of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance: Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics behemoth, would build a $10 billion Wisconsin plant to make flat-screen televisions, creating 13,000 jobs. President Trump later called the project<\/a> \u201cthe eighth wonder of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that prospect looks less certain.<\/p>\n

Pointing to \u201cnew realities\u201d in the market, the company said Wednesday that it was reassessing the plans, underscoring the difficult economics of manufacturing in the United States. \u201cThe global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed,\u201d Foxconn said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Company officials had signaled for months that their emphasis was increasingly on research and development rather than large-scale production, dampening the potential for blue-collar job creation.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

The Foxconn statement followed a Reuters report<\/a> that Louis Woo, a special assistant to the company\u2019s chairman, Terry Gou, had said the costs of manufacturing screens for televisions and other consumer products were too high in the United States.<\/span>

\u201cIn terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,\u201d Mr. Woo told Reuters. \u201cWe can\u2019t compete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Walker and state lawmakers had agreed to more than $4 billion in tax credits<\/a> and other inducements over a 15-year period, an unusually high figure, for a plant in Mount Pleasant, near Racine.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sound you hear is the final nail being hammered into the coffin of Scott Walker’s political career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because he offered over $4 billion in subsidies to the electronics manufacturer Foxconn to build a factory, an amount that could never be recouped. It gets even better, because now Foxconn has announced that it won’t be building the factory after all. It appears that there wasn’t a, “No backsies,” provision in the contract: It …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[446,365,364,588,374],"class_list":["post-178242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-budget","tag-business","tag-evil","tag-fail","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}